2020 Little Easy Bean Network - An Exciting Adventure In Heirloom Beans !

[Blue-Jay]

@flowerbug,

All the beans have been shelled for the last three weeks. They have been sitting each variety on red styro picnic plates that you can get at Walmart.

I'm in the photo taking stage. About two weeks ago I spent a week taking nearly 200 photos. After downloading them to my computer I discovered they were all too dark. So I discarded them and started all over. So far I've photoed about 80 of 157 beans I planted this year. After the photos are done I will show off this years grow out here on this thread. Some of the beans you might remember seeing before and some new ones. I'll show off so many beans each day and in between I will start going through all the varieties sorting out incomplete seed coats, very small and misshappened beans, stained seed. All that will be scrap seed that I will wind up cooking and making soup or baked beans out of. Not a whole lot goes to waste.

When the sorting is done. I will pick prime seed and save about 60 seeds of each variety for future planting. Those beans will be put into three 20 count packets using 2 x 3 inch 4 mil ziploc baggies and go into the freezer and then record their box location on a computer list. The larger amounts of seed left over of each variety will be packed about 1.5 ounces in 3 x 4 inch ziplocs and packeted away in the freezer. Outcrosses that aren't stable yet I will pick 60 prime seeds for future grow outs and the rest of the quantity will be eaten.

I just finished up today all the outside work with the bean plots. Such a gorgeous week of weather we've had. 70 + degrees nearly all week long. All pole bean steaks, marker steaks, and garden weed control fabric were pulled up and packed away in my garage. All the dead plants were shredded with my lawn mower. The ground in all my bean plots have been tilled and back to bare soil. A little over 3,700 square feet of bean ground.

 

[Artorius]

I have shelled out all the pods and started taking photos for my archive.

Ridgerunner, these are the Karachaganak seeds I got this year.

From plants that grew as a bush, I got oval seeds, they were all similar.

From the plants that grew as a half-runner (about 2 meters high) , I got two kinds of seeds:
Oval, larger than the previous ones...

...and big, more elongated.

What do you think about them? Which of them should be left for future sowing? This is your variety, and I don't want to cause a fuss.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Beautiful aren't they. At least color and pattern is staying consistent. That is encouraging.

I think you got the same thing I got. The climbing half-runners, some more oval and some more round, and the non-climbing "bush" ones that look a lot like the rounder half-runners. I'm not sure if the non-climbing bush are truly bush or semi-runners. By the definition I've seen bush are around 60 cm (2 ft) tall while semi-runners are more like 1 meter (3 ft) tall. I don't know if there is any difference in bush and semi-runners other than just height. Keight can vary based on growing season and soils so it gets very confusing to me.

The plan last I heard was that @Bluejay77 and I were both going to grow them again next year and compare notes. Any information from you or anyone else growing them would be very welcome. I'm very pleased you got the results you did.

I think there are three different beans there. I don't have a strong feeling toward which should carry the Karachaganak name forward but I think it should be one that has stabilized. If we can be confident the bush (semi-runner) has stabilized it would be a logical one to go forward, at least to me. But if it is not stabilized then either of the other two would work. So it's still up in the air.

I plan to grow all three next year and see what happens. Whichever one we settle on as Karachaganak gets settled. My plan is to grow the others and make sure they are stabilized and eventually give them totally different names. I think it is such a pretty bean it will be grown so it needs to be stabilized in shape and growth habit.

 

[Blue-Jay]

@Artorius,

Oh such beautiful seed ! So glad to see you are getting such nice quality seed. They are beautiful. They are so nice and filled out. The last two seasons I have been getting more seed that won't fill out, but sunken and shriveled in places on the seeds.

So I think the difference to me in Bush and semi runners is that Bush types are determinate and semi runners will twine and climb on things like pole beans do. Just not as high. maybe little more than a meter. Maybe some a meter and a third.

All my photo archiving of what I grew myself is finished for this year. I thought though after all the networks beans have finally arrived I will photo all of those too and show them here.

 

[flowerbug]

my guess is that the heat is a bit too much of a stress for the plants. i get nicely shaped beans during the early summer and later summer and then things in between usually aren't that good at all. only for some varieties like the yellow eye which has the same round shape as those pictured above.

if you keep using weed barrier you may have to also put up shade cloth.

 

[Blue-Jay]

The shriveled and sunken seed is water stress. I wrote Juan Osorno dry bean breeder at the University of North Dakota and asked him what causes seed to be shriveled and sunken in places. In other words not completely filled out. That is what he told me. I think lack of water will affect beans faster than heat will.

This depends a lot on variety too. I have had some varieties this summer produce a lot of shriveled seed and some varieties growing in the same area and soil hardley affected at all.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Russ's 2020 Bean Show
​

I will post 5 beans everyday that I've grown this past summer until I've run out of this summer bean crop to post. This will probably run until the 13th of December.

#15 Sux YeE - 5.1 - Bush Dry. This is one of the Robert Lobitz legacy beans that I've acquired in 2015. From a former SSE member Ron Thuma of Hartford, Kansas. Ron acquired a number of beans that Robert had from his brother James around 2008 that were just number coded. I'm assuming these were probably beans that Robert would have worked to stablize had he lived beyond 2006. Ron grew these beans for about three years and unknown to me at the time he put them away in his freezer I think after the 2012 season. When I had learned that he had these beans at these SSE campout in July of 2012. I asked him if I could be of assistance in this project and he said no. I could understand his attitude after all he went through the trouble of getting the beans and contacting Robert's brother. I wrote to him in April of 2015 and asked how he was coming with these beans and he told me he had become frustrated with them and put them away in a box in his freezer. He wrote back to me and told me I could have them and that he would mail them to me which he did.

I found this bean in a still unnamed Legacy bean last year in 2019 in #15-Sux-YeE-5. The bean has a similar seed coat color and pattern as Pawnee but doesn't appear to be soil sensitive. It's grown in two different soils and seems to display a nice bright seed coat with good amount of white to brown ratio.
This summer was the first grow out after discovering it last year and it threw off three other seed coat combinations.


#15-Sux-YeE-5.1 Off Type 1


Off Type 2 Off Type 3


#15-Sux-YeE-5.5 Bush Dry. This bean showed up in the same grow out as the #15-Sux-YeE-5.1. I was curious about this little white bean with a brown soldier figure and grew it out also this summer. It did not produce any segregregations. It appears to be the same bean as the Off Type 3 above.


#15-Sux-YeE-5.5

12-12-97B -Ottertail Bush Dry. Another of the Robert Lobitz Legacy beans. This one has grown the same for several yeas so I decided this summer to give it the name of Ottertail for the town of Ottertial, Minnesota. In keeping with the way Robert named his beans. This bean develops short plants and doesn't seem to produce a really large volume of seed. Perhaps I haven't found the right soil that would make this bean more productive.


Ottertial

African Premier - Bush Dry. I first encountered this bean in 1978 as one of the 35 beans I first acquired that year from John Withee from Lynnfield, Massachusetts. John was famous in those days for his Wanigan Associates bean collection. Country of origin is Kenya. This year was the first really decent size crop of this bean I have had since 2014.


African Premier

Algarrobo - Bush Dry. Nice producitve bean from Columbia. This beans seed didn't hardly exibit any water stress. I acquired the bean from Amy Hawk of Calhan, Colorado in 2011 from her Simply Beans website. I ran across her site again this summer to find that she has retired from selling beans anymore.


Algarrobo

 

[Michael Lusk]

@Bluejay77 It's been a strange year in my garden but I'm almost ready to get the beans packaged up and shipped. I'm going to have a full return of Warpath, Verde Temecu, Milky Way and a smaller batch of Blue Star Gold. War Path did particularly well and I was happy for this since you said they were the last of the seed.

The Blue Star Gold were a really strange one. I planted them in mid spring with the rest. They were huge plants but they didn't produce pods until mid September which is way too late for Indianapolis. I finally uprooted the giant plants and hung them up in my garage to dry. Some of the seeds don't seem to have fully developed their seed coats but I'm still grabbing them when they seem dry enough.

I also grew the Pink Tip again this year and if you'd like I can certainly include a bag of these...they do particularly well here. Just let me know!

I hope to have some pics up soon!

 

[Blue-Jay]

@Michael Lusk,

Sounds things didn't turn out too badly for the Network beans you grew. I don't know what kind of breeding Blue Gold Star has in it, but I do know it comes from a fellow in California. It could be that it's just not a great bean. Sometimes some varieties turn out disappointing or perplexing us.

Yes send some of those Pink Tip beans along. I grew them once in the early 80's and would like to try them again.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Russ's 2020 Bean Show
Day 2​

Alice Sunshine - Bush Snap. One of the many Robert Lobitz original named beans that he released through the Seed Savers Exchange in the early 2000's. The bean produced some fairly nice quality seed this year, but not a whole lot of them. I've got a smaller backyard plot that I finally realized does not grow great beans. It won't be growing beans again. I don't know what is with the soil there, but I have a soil sample to send into a lab and see what they come up with.

Angel Eye - Bush Dry. And outcross discovered a couple of years ago in my backyard plot in one of my Rabbit's Foot segregations. Rabbits Foot is an outcross found in a 4 pound package of Jacob's Cattle from Rancho Gordo in California. Angel has grown stable a number of times and was named by a Guy Dirix of Meise, Belgium.


Alice Sunshine .........................................................Angel Eye

Armenian Giant Black - Pole Snap. Large podded bean. I grew this bean last year and it did well. Grown in my south flower bed this year the bean produced a scanty amount of seed. The summer was very dry here and I ran my soaker hoses every week, but I think the dryness was a bit tough on all the beans.

Aubrey Deane - Pole Lima. I've seen this bean listed in the Seed Savers Exchange yearbook, but I acquired this bean from Sussane Alex of Willich, Germany in a bean trade earlier this year. The bean got a late start and I didn't harvest half the pods it produced but I still wound up with a very good pile of beans. I can only imagine how it will produce in the right enviornment.


Armenian Giant Black ..............................................Aubrey Deane

Bamberger Blaue - Bush Dry. Haven't grown this one for about six years. Another bean acquired from a grower in Germany. It produced a very low volume of beans this summer. I did get some decent new seed to grow it again sometime.


Bamberger Blaue